Carmen Dell'Orefice: eternal grace

BY Judy Rumbold |
13 January 2008

Carmen Dell'Orefice - still working the catwalk at 76 - has a stamina that would shame models a quarter of her age, along with a grace that belies an often turbulent life. She tells Judy Rumbold how she stays so serene and luminous

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Carmen Dell'Orefice is routinely referred to as 'the world's oldest working model', which makes her sound a bit like a rusting traction engine with, perhaps, compromised bodywork and only limited functioning parts. It would be nice to be able to report that, at 76, this catwalk veteran is in flawless working order, but when I arrive to meet her things are not looking good. She is lying in silence on a sofa in a distant corner of the photographic studio, most of her face obscured behind sunglasses, barely moving and facing the wall. Everything about her body language says, 'Go away.'

I am more than a little apprehensive. A young model in a strop is bad enough, but an older, grander one with more than 60 years' experience and photographs by Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton and Horst P Horst to her name is altogether more worrying. The Carmen Dell'Orefice of legend, with the knife-edge cheekbones, startling blue eyes and signature cloud of white hair, has about her the sort of hauteur that suggests she might easily have an icily Snow Queenish way with a withering put-down.

I approach gingerly, at which point she whips off the glasses, sits bolt upright and greets me with the warmest, twinkliest smile I have seen outside a village knitting circle. Arthritic toes, she explains cheerfully - a legacy of her days dancing with the Ballets Russes in New York - are the reason for her horizontality, coupled with chronic fatigue after a late night and little sleep thanks to hotel pillows like boulders.

Given her fragile physical state, she looks as if she should probably be back at home, parked in front of Countdown with a milky drink. I ask her why on earth, in this era of the extensive 'pillow menu', she didn't kick up a big stink with the hotel management. She looks aghast at the suggestion. 'What, and come over as the ugly American, complaining?'

Throwing hissy fits might come naturally to some of today's pushy fashion folk, but Dell'Orefice is from a different era. She is gracious, modest and gloriously old-school in her approach to her profession. Take the fact that today she is feeling a bit of a crock. While a younger girl might cry off for something as lame as a broken fingernail, Dell'Orefice isn't going to let aching feet and tiredness come in the way of an assignment. Some of today's models are wont to turn up for shoots looking like filthy, sleep-deprived crack whores, but she arrived immaculately turned out.

What soon becomes clear is that she feels highly privileged still to be doing a job that started with her first Vogue cover at the age of 15. She has had five more since, with recent career highlights including a catwalk appearance in Jean Paul Gaultier's first show for Hermès in 2004 and John Galliano's Dior haute couture show in 2000. And to think that her sceptical mother dismissed her as an ungainly child with 'ears like sedan chairs and feet like coffins'.

It took an astute fellow bus passenger, all those years ago, to see potential beyond the ears and feet. Journeying back from a dance class in New York, she was spotted by a woman whose husband was a photographer for Harper's Bazaar. Test pictures were duly taken, after which a letter was sent to her mother. 'It said I was a very polite young lady but, unfortunately, at this time, I was totally unphotogenic,' she recalls. But her godfather was having none of it. He contacted a friend who worked for Vogue. 'Two weeks later, I did my first shoot for Horst.'

She recounts a meeting, when she was 14, with the legendary editor Diana Vreeland. 'She stood behind me, ran her hands through my voluptuous chestnut locks and said, "Grow your neck another inch and I'll send you to Paris." The rest is history. 'My life has been amazing,' she sighs. 'How many other ladies of 76 can say that the snapshot on their senior citizen's card was taken by Norman Parkinson?'

Mind you, those early days were interspersed with what, in the current climate of heightened concern for model welfare, sound like some eyewateringly non-PC moments. Condé Nast, for instance, paid for hormone injections to correct her concave chest and bring on puberty, which had been arrested by rheumatic fever contracted at 12 and a punishing regime with the Ballets Russes. Then there was the time, aged 13, she posed topless for Salvador Dalí for $12 a hour. Imagine what today's Model Health Inquiry would make of that. She dismisses any suggestion of a sleazy subtext: 'It was all a lot more innocent then. And I was grateful to be able to help my mother stop working and send her to college.'

This would sound selfless and mature coming from a 30-year-old, but Dell'Orefice was 13 at the time. She was forced to grow up quickly, under a cloud of disapproval and casual violence ('My mother was, shall we say, very hands-on,' she says, drily). The mother, a Hungarian, was ambitious for her daughter to achieve success, first with ballet (cut short by illness), then later as a swimmer (scuppered by a foot broken while skiing with a boyfriend). An ex-dancer herself, Carmen's mother was not pleased with the way her daughter was shaping up, and never lost an opportunity to demonstrate her displeasure. 'I was a sad child,' she recalls. 'I just wanted her to love me.' But life was hard. 'We were so poor that my mother would often leave me in a foster home until she could raise enough money to rent rooms for us.' Modelling helped them out of poverty. When little more than a girl, Carmen was earning $60 a week (equivalent to about £600 now), putting herself through private school, paying for her own orthodontic braces and secretly subsidising her adored father, an Italian violinist, who left home when she was small. She had gone looking for him when she was 15. 'We were close from then on, much to my mother's angst and chagrin. She did all the work, and he got all the love.'

With extraordinary candidness she details her teenage years, which seem to have featured all sorts of unsuitable men and unsavoury situations. She met, or in her words 'bought', her first husband - 'a lout' - at 16. 'I bought racehorses for him, and after a few abortions I married him at 21. I had my daughter, Laura, and by the time I was 24 the marriage was over.' There were two further failed marriages and, as a young girl under the spell of some of the greatest names in photography, many flights of romantic fancy. 'To this day I have a crush on Irving Penn,' she says, and what she describes as 'a lifelong love of Parkinson'. At the moment she isn't seeing a particular man, but makes no bones about her continuing need for physical closeness. Is sex important still? She bats straight back, 'Is breathing important?'

These days she lives in a New York flat stuffed with posters and pictures by Avedon and the rest, 'in the closets and under the bed'. Which are her favourite photographs? 'That's like asking someone to pick out their favourite child,' she answers. These were all 'fathers' to her, she says wistfully, remembering the support and comfort they provided when her own family life seemed so chaotic.

While she may have enjoyed close friendships with the men she worked with, the same can't be said of her relationship with her daughter, now in her early fifties and working as a therapist in California. Things were never going to be easy for a girl who had a goddess for a mother. As Laura has put it, 'My mother always said, "You have your good looks in your own right," but I never believed her. Because why didn't I have those long legs? And how come my hips and bosom weren't in proportion the way hers were? She was like a Barbie doll to me, and I was just not there.'

'She was coloured by everyone's attitude towards me,' says Dell'Orefice. 'And yet I always said to her, "Your mother's just your mother."' Over the years there have been periods of estrangement, and what sounds like horribly fraught, sporadic contact.

All of which would be enough to etch the face of even the most resilient mother. Dell'Orefice has her share of wrinkles, but she is an intelligent, thoughtful woman who has somehow made peace with her tumultuous past, absolved herself of any feelings of guilt and retained a calm equanimity that shows in her face. Her clear-eyed radiance must surely be underpinned by a long, arduous skincare regime, involving many different unguents and potions. How else would she look so good?

In fact, her big beauty secret boils down to nothing more complex than a unpromising-sounding product called Bag Balm, an ointment developed by a dairy farmer for softening cow teats. Now it's mainly used for equine purposes, 'and if it's good enough for horses, it's good enough for me.' She says it's like Elizabeth Arden's cultish Eight Hour Cream, but a fraction of the price. 'Three dollars ninety-nine for a year's supply!' she exclaims, jubilant. Here is a woman who likes a bargain. When I admire her expensive-looking ring, she takes great pleasure in yelling, 'Twenty-eight dollars! Banana Republic!'

As a fashion-loving but impoverished young model in the postwar years, keeping up with trends was impossible if you weren't blessed with the thrift gene. She used to buy charity-shop blankets to make coats. 'Me and Suzy Parker [the model and actress] always took our sewing-machines to Paris so we could make something to wear in the evening.' Among her friends, she has a reputation as a keen needlewoman, but even she can't hope to do justice to the five sewing-machines she now owns. 'Friends keep leaving them to me when they die.'

In recent years both a long-term partner and her mother have passed away, along with many close friends. But she's not one for mourning and regret. 'I've been busy trying to help people die a good death. I don't believe in funerals. I believe in celebrating life, and showing people, while they're alive, how much I care about them. And I don't believe in this business of burial. I'm an organ donor. Whether its my skin or my eyeballs, use whatever bits are intact and put the rest in the garbage.'

I have been looking at her intently for going on two hours now, and feel qualified to say that, at 76, Carmen Dell'Orefice is still luminously beautiful. If she were to drop dead tomorrow, and her body were up for grabs, take it from me, there really isn't a lot you'd want to bin.